(The following article by Stacie Hamel was posted on the Omaha World-Herald website on January 31.)
OMAHA, Neb. — Two major railroad unions announced Monday that they have agreed to work together against one-person train crews and to not sign individual agreements with the rail carriers’ negotiating committee that would protect one union’s jobs at the expense of the other.
The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen and the United Transportation Union issued a joint statement and held a conference call Monday on their plan to campaign together against one-person train crews.
The nation’s freight railroads – including the Omaha-based Union Pacific – want to cut train crews to one person and consolidate engineer’s and conductor’s jobs into a single category. Train crews generally are two or three people – an engineer and at least one conductor.
The National Mediation Board is involved in the negotiations.
The BLE&T generally represents engineers, and the UTU represents conductors. The two unions have battled in the past over jobs and proposals to merge.
Union leaders said Monday that they eventually might unite in negotiating. That won’t happen, though, as long as the UTU has a pending lawsuit against rail carriers over their request to reopen labor agreements governing crew size.
“As time goes on, we’ll see how things progress,” said Don M. Hahs, president of the BLE&T, which is a division of the rail conference of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
Rail carriers have used “dirty pool” through their National Carriers Conference Committee, said Hahs and Paul C. Thompson, president of the UTU. The committee, which negotiates on behalf of the railroads, has tried to pit the unions against each other, even promising each that the other union’s jobs would be eliminated, the two union leaders said.
Joanna Moorhead, the committee’s general counsel, said, “We’ve agreed with each of these unions to hold in confidence what we discuss at the bargaining table. It’s disappointing that the BLE and UTU have elected to disregard those commitments. We will continue to honor our commitment to conduct negotiations at the bargaining table and not in the press. And we will not respond to allegations and innuendoes made during a press conference.”
Negotiations are set to resume today and Wednesday between the carriers’ committee and a rail labor coalition that includes the BLE&T, Moorhead said.
The next round of negotiations with the UTU is set for Feb. 16 and 17.
Hahs and Thompson said negotiations so far have been fruitless because the carriers are not making a real effort toward agreement on any issue. They charged that the carriers are trying to force negotiations to an impasse, which would bring the appointment of a Presidential Emergency Board and possibly congressional action.
Thompson said, “No negotiations have gone on that were meaningful at all.”
Concerns about safety prompted the two unions to act, Hahs and Thompson said. The possibility of one-person crews is too serious to allow concerns for the unions themselves to get in the way of what is best for their members, they said.
“We have a serious fatigue problem in this industry,” Thompson said. “We are putting this country in danger if we don’t get out there and do something about it.”
Fatigue is just one safety concern that the unions have about one-person crews, they said. Others concern hazardous-waste shipments, vulnerability to terrorist attacks, grade-crossing accidents and reliability of new technology.
The railroad industry is testing computerized train control, also called positive train control, but the technology is not ready for widespread use, Thompson and Hahs said.
In a recent interview, U.P. President and Chief Executive Officer James Young said one-person crews are “the next logical step” in improving safety and dealing with attrition. Young was not responding to the unions’ Monday statement.
Young said U.P. would not implement smaller crews immediately if they were authorized. His statement was in contrast to comments by U.P. Chairman Dick Davidson. Davidson has said that U.P. would implement one-person crews as soon as they were authorized, especially in coal routes of Wyoming’s Powder River Basin.
“The technology will have to be there,” Young said in the interview. “We have to recognize the environment we’re in . . . though Dick is right – we could run one-person crews today.”
Peggy Wilhide of the Association of American Railroads said all the freight railroads – including Union Pacific – have agreed not to change crew size until advanced train-control technology is in place.
“They’ll negotiate it, but they will not change the crew consist until new technology is implemented,” Wilhide said. “It is just as safe to run a train with one person with that technology as it is today with two people.”
Wilhide said she wasn’t sure what the timeline is for having the technology in place. The cost to implement it on the four U.S.-based freight railroads would be $2 billion, she said.
The two union leaders on Monday called on the Federal Railroad Administration to initiate a major study of the technology, how it would be used and whether intersecting railroads would use comparable systems that would offer seamless interaction. Testing, they said, also should include how well the technology would operate in various conditions, such as stopping trains on steep grades.
“Surely if they are going to look at allowing a new technology,” Thompson said, “there should be a real in-depth study to make sure that it does what it is supposed to do.”
As part of the two unions’ agreement, the UTU withdrew its application to have a worker vote on a single union representing all train service employees of Union Pacific. The BLE&T agreed to stop trying to organize UTU members.